The Butchering [The Cutting (Step Two)]

Photo: Keli Dougherty

The Cutting was without a doubt the most 'performance' like (in the traditional sense) work i created for I.E ANIMUL. By this i mean that there was an actual audience in attendance. Several people showed up to take photos of the butchering of this beast. This was most fortunate as there is a marvelous amount of photographic and video documentation of the event.

After setting up and preparing myself mentally, i climbed atop the Lumina and tried to visualize a straight line down the center of it. Once i was ready, I let the Dewalt heavy duty reciprocating saw rip into the sheet metal flesh of the car. The blade bucked and kicked as it tore its way through the metal and foam. My weight on the roof was causing it to sag and catch the blade. As I forced the blade backward it cut well enough, sending shards of twisted sheet metal everywhere, a piece of it hitting me rather close to my eye. This was my first indication that my face shield was not down...once again i was lucky.

Before long the roof was completely cut and I had to remove the trunk so that i could get to other things that needed cutting. After removing it, I realized that i probably could have done this earlier.

Photo: Keli Dougherty

Next, I decided to cut the firewall between the engine compartment and the interior of the vehicle. I originally thought that this would be very difficult but as it turns out it went quite smoothly. I then got inside the car and found the point where the firewall cut had stopped. I slipped my blade through the tight slit and pulled my trigger. The saw cut like a hot knife through butter and less then ten minutes later i had cut all along the interior to where the trunk began. It was time to stop for lunch.

Photo: Keli Dougherty

The grilled hamburgers and hot dogs played a crucial role in this work. Not only were they an important part in securing an audience for the event but they also served to place the idea of a feast into the minds of those viewers. This is important because it mimes the traditional village feast that would occur when a hunter would slay a beast.

One other role it performed was to provide me with crucial nourishment during the arduous task of cutting a car in two.

Photo: Keli Dougherty

After lunch I finished cutting through the trunk and got down to the back bumper. At this point i decided that it would be good to cut through the front sections of the frame with a cutting torch. I decided to do the cutting from outside the compartment as I thought there might be some flammable fluids and grease left in the steering column. This was indeed the case and some small spurts of flame did shoot out in the cutting.

There were a lot of fumes and black smoke being produced, and in retrospect it would have been a good idea to have a respirator. After a while I was all the way through the frame pieces and it seemed like only the back and front bumpers and a few sheets of metal were holding the car together.

After an hour of attempting to cut through the rear bumper, and its continued resistance to the saw I decided to call it a day and continue to cut the following day. At the time I believed that there was only a little left. As it turned out, I was wrong and there was still much to do.

Photo: Bernard Suchit

The next day I returned to the project. I labored to cut the rear bumper and was successful. I then sliced through the front bumper and a section of sheet metal on the front. At this point I still thought I was close, but I soon realized that I had missed something crucial. The rear suspension was still holding the car together. I missed it because i was cutting from inside the car and it seamed as though I had cut all of the way through it.

To tackle this problem, I had to use the saw to cut open a hole in the metal directly above the suspension so that I could gain access to it for the torch. Once I was able to get in there, cutting it was not a very big problem.

After that, most of the car was truly cut. I had to use bolt cutters to cut the brake line that ran across the car and a couple of thin metal rods that ran across the trunk. Finally I quickly sliced through the last piece of sheet metal at the front of the car (the only thing holding it together).

After all that, with a little help from some friends, the car pulled right in half and was truly split. This moment was a huge sigh of relief for me as it was until this point the hardest as well as the most important piece of work for the entire project. Whats more was that the inclusion of the driver's side in the final gallery exhibition was perhaps the most impressive thing in the show.

Truly it was impressive even to me that I had cut it in half. Walking in between the two pieces of the car and inspecting the parts from a different angle was incredibly interesting to me.